Competitive analysis is the process of collecting and examining information about your competitors and their business practices. This analysis gives you an idea of your position in the market and helps you improve your products/services and marketing strategies, accordingly.
Need for Competitive Analysis:
Today, we live in a world of competition and it has become mandatory to maintain an edge over others, to remain successful. You need to find out what your competitors are up to, what services/products they offer their customers and what you must do to sustain a competitive advantage. In short, competitive analysis helps you get a clear picture of your competition, foresee market changes and demands, discover opportunities for improvement, and identify new ways to attract customers, thus saving time and money.
New Practices of Competitive Analysis:
Generally, SEO practices for Competitor Analysisare ever evolving. What worked today is not likely to work tomorrow. As the trend of the market changes, you need to involve creativeness in your practices too. If you want to remain on top, you need to follow new practices of competitive analysis. Let’s see what they are:
- Mining socially shared content: Social media is indeed a powerful source for competitive analysis. Visit sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Google+, Pinterest etc., to check if your competitors have a social media presence. It is always better to mine socially shared content rather than back links. You can evaluate your competitors based on their social and link popularity by tracking the number of fans they have, how frequently they post, what kind of content they publish, how frequently the fans interact with the content and so on.
- Mining content which drives traffic: Next, you need to figure out the content of your competitors’ websites and see what they are doing to rank well. Make a note of what type of content they use to drive traffic, what kind of title tags and meta tags they use along with the headings, alt tags and anchor texts for internal links. There are several types of content that you can mine to drive traffic. Some of them include blog posts, ebooks, white papers, videos, webinars, podcasts, press releases, case studies, data sheets, FAQs, buyer’s guides, slide decks, infographics, etc. The more content your website has, the more opportunities you have to use your keywords.
- Analyze competitors’ link strategies: An analysis of your competitors’ link building strategies will help you benchmark the best, strongest and the most worthwhile practices in your industry. Moreover, it gives you an idea about the link building strategies that work and those which don’t. Being aware of the link building strategies of your competitors will help you understand what links can be added to your website, the number of links that you need to build to get good rankings etc.
- Using the right tools of the trade: There are numerous tools that have been designed to help you evaluate your competition. The most popular ones are Open Site Explorer, Majestic SEO and FollowerWonk. Open Site Explorer runs a competitive analysis of your site versus other sites and determines your chances of ousting competitors, while Majestic SEO provides subdomain and link profile information of your competitors’ websites. Making use of the comparison feature in FollowerWonk (Twitter analytics tool) you get to know about the target audience of your competitors.
Competitive analysis explores various business techniques and helps analysts and decision-makers formulate valid conclusions from the limited data available. To be successful, a professional must keep track of what is happening in his industry and with his competitors. To survive in this competitive world, you need to analyze each and every force and draw a plan of action to attack. Traditional competitive analysis methods like taking part in networking functions, reading industry periodicals and annual reports, listening to quarterly earnings calls etc., also work well.